George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Our first spring semester workshop with Hope McCaffrey, Richards Center Assistant Program Director and Assistant Research Professor, will be held next Wednesday, January 21, 1:30-3:00 pm, in 102 Weaver Building.

The group will be workshopping Hope’s article, “’My Room-mate is a Democrat’: Young Women’s Political Culture at Midwestern Schools in the 1850s.” This article examines young women at Midwestern coeducational schools and female seminaries who, in the decade prior to the Civil War, insisted on making partisanship part of their education. Within a society that peddled a cult of domesticity, most institutions of higher learning in this period sought to prepare girls for maternal roles and deliberately eschewed politics on campus. Yet just because educators, commentators, and politicians instructed young women to avoid partisanship does not mean they did so. The young women who increasingly populated Midwestern places of higher learning developed their politics as a crucial component of their identities and their sense of white female citizenship